McDonald's as of late sent off something many refer to as the Kartik Aaryan Dinner. When a fast food chain does something like this, you'd think it would also try to come up with new products. But no, the Kartik Aaryan Meal is just regular McDonald's food that has his face plastered on the packaging. A sandwich with sauces and patties that reflects the actor's personality was never thought of. The Kartik Aaryan Dinner at McDonald's is basically the most reliable similitude that you might actually find for his new film, Satyaprem Ki Katha, which is basically similar to the sort of movies that Ayushmann Khurrana would've done before Bollywood apparently chose to organize a threatening takeover of his portion of the overall industry.
The industry forced Khurrana out of the niche he had helped create and inserted other stars into a series of socially conscious films after sensing some kind of power vacuum when Khurrana's films started performing poorly during the pandemic. Bawaal, which debuted to negative reviews on Prime Video recently, and Satyaprem Ki Katha, which had a surprising amount of success in theaters a few weeks ago, are two examples of these films.
However, Satyaprem Ki Katha somehow escaped with impunity, whereas Bawaal was (to a certain extent) criticized upon its release for its equally offensive gender politics and its ill-conceived Hitler parallels. It's one thing for no one to have grumbled about it from the roofs, however for the film to have really been commended for its apparent progressiveness was honestly crippling. This is where we come in because, forget being progressive, Satyaprem Ki Katha has to be one of the cruelest Hindi films in recent memory because it is enslaved to troubling narrative tropes that you would think had been eliminated a decade ago; narrative tropes that were also used recently in Hindi films like Raksha Bandhan and Jayeshbhai Jordaar.
The movie completely ignores a lot of Sattu's questionable behavior over the course of two hours because it is so determined to reach the point where it reveals Katha's biggest "secret," which is that she has survived sexual assault. Although he is not an outright monster like Bawaal's Ajju Bhaiya, they are alike. Sattu, like Ajju, is of the opinion that a woman is inherently flawed if she has undergone mental or physical trauma.
Even though Katha makes it abundantly clear to him that she is not single, he falls head over heels in love with her the second he sees her. At the point when he hears tattle about her separation some time later, he chooses to — hang tight for it — break into her home to amaze her. Honestly, they aren't companions; they're scarcely even colleagues right now, yet the film acts as though this is a heartfelt signal straight out of Aladdin. In some measure at first, before he finds that Katha has cut her wrists and is biting the dust before his eyes. Sattu gets her to the hospital in time, but the movie has a habit of abruptly switching tone, leaving you with whiplash that you'll have to deal with until the next movie with Kartik Aaryan comes out.
The issue with Bawaal was that it was so satisfied with its saccharine perceptions about disaster that, with an end goal to place things into viewpoint by contrasting everything with the Holocaust (since how would you contend with that?), it totally failed to remember that it was giving a raw deal to Janhvi Kapoor's personality. She ought to have been the hero of the film and not Ajju.
This is also what Satyaprem Ki Katha does. Sattu's circular segment is fairly standard, yet the film is so given to him that it neglects to perceive that it has an undeniably really intriguing person directly in front of its. It's one thing to disregard a person, however Satyaprem Ki Katha makes it a stride further. The film is effectively horrible to Katha, the living exemplification of the Lenient Lady figure of speech. Scene upon scene is intended to embarrass her, put her in the corner, and make her wriggle — just to extend Sattu as a holy messenger. Marvelously, she survives the whole film, however what she's put through is vague from 'fridging' — the figure of speech where female characters are harmed, assaulted, killed, or for the most part mishandled, as a plot gadget planned to move a male person's story circular segment forward.
To begin with, she's pawned off to him by her folks — Katha is plainly over his head — like she's a futile Diwali gift. It greatly dehumanizes. Katha's dad accepts that since she had a fetus removal — he doesn't realize that she was physically attacked — she is harmed products. Sattu is aware that he has struck gold, and despite the fact that he witnessed her attempted suicide and is aware that something is off, he does not question it. For a large portion of the film, all he appears to need more than anything more is to lose his virginity.
Sattu runs off to her father to complain that he has been essentially chained to someone who isn't willing to do her duty as a wife (which is code for "she isn't willing to satisfy my needs") when Katha refuses to sleep with him by first claiming that she is asexual. Once more later, following a heartfelt outing, when Katha says 'no' in totally unambiguous terms, Sattu eases off. as he ought to. However, the movie believes that he is now worthy of sainthood. Is it really necessary for us to organize parades for men who exhibit basic decency? People need to stop praising themselves for recognizing the lack of consent because acknowledging the absence of consent is not a heroic act.
Be that as it may, we should save Sattu briefly and center around the film's real hero, Katha. She is forced to relive her trauma in multiple scenes, and the people around her either act unaware or ashamed. A scene where a meddling relative comes around and requests to know why she wasn't spoiled by Katha is profoundly awkward to watch, for the most part due to how dastardly it is towards her. She in the end separates and comes clean with Sattu's family, while he is in a real sense playing the legend and thrashing the one who mishandled her. She has hardly any familiarity with this, incidentally; he didn't take her authorization.
The most ridiculously unfortunate second, but comes in the film's stupendous peak, when Sattu nonchalantly tells no less than 50 individuals at a public get-together about Katha's horrible past, without to such an extent as inquiring as to whether she is OK with him doing this. She ought to have been startled, yet she never stops him. He didn't have to tell the story; it wasn't his mysterious to uncover, however to no one's surprise, Sattu couldn't resist the opportunity to make everything about himself. When you have a trustworthy partner in the movie, it's easy. Furthermore, despite the fact that he perceives that he shouldn't have done this a couple of moments later, the film doesn't want to make sense of how he has realized this, nor does Sattu appear to be even somewhat repentant about his way of behaving. All things being equal, the film continues to send him on another triumph lap for having the insight to recognize that he was off-base. Things don't work that way.
"Legend champion ki jaan nahi bachayega toh legend kaisa (A legend isn't a legend in the event that he can't save the courageous woman)," Sattu says at one point in the film. Furthermore, it takes him weeks to comprehend that his courageous woman needn't bother with a hero by any means; She requires an ally instead. Yet, this happens in a real sense five minutes before the end credits, in a two-hour-forty-minute film that doesn't figure out the distinction among strengthening and rise.
Satyaprem Ki Katha can barely be depicted as a women's activist film, essentially in light of how it treats Katha's personality. Not only does it entrust her story to a man and strip her of her agency, but it also happens to be a man she was forced to marry; a man who gets angry when she says she won't have sex with him; who accepts a shop and a car as dowry happily; who commits actual viciousness for her benefit and without her endorsement, and afterward exclaims her most profound mystery before outsiders. Satyaprem Ki Katha believes that you should praise his activities over her strength.